Comments on: Folding@Home on AWS to kick the arse of coronavirus

By: Gergely Imreh

Gergely Imreh — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 19:41:37 +0000

In reply to Mike. It sounds like great news for science! Thanks for dropping a note here! :D

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 22:08:46 +0000

Thanks for the write-up. I’ve been playing with a spot p3.2xlarge on Ubuntu 20.04 (ami-0e84e211558a022c0). I’m installing only fahclient_7.4.4_amd64.deb since I have FAHControl running on my local machine to see how it’s doing. nvidia-headless-435 was already installed on my image, but after updating the config.xml, restarting FAHClient, and being patient (~10 minutes) the GPU started cranking. About 4.5M PPD!

By: Gergely Imreh

Gergely Imreh — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 22:26:11 +0000

In reply to Kit. Bumped version to the latest 7.6.9, though that needed some workaround (as it doesn't seem to get GPUs.txt by itself on startup, and that just blocks any proper running and GPU tasks). I'm all for updating software versions, the bugs can be quite annoying, though.

By: Gergely Imreh

Gergely Imreh — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 22:24:28 +0000

In reply to Cole Goeppinger.

That works as well, I found this nice low-touch for my use cases, but yours is definitely more reproducable.

I’m guessing the cron-job is more successful due to the exponential back-off of the client when it cannot get a job. After a few tries, that time becomes quite long, and restarting short-circuits that. I guess that would need some other debugging of the cron parts whether things run correctly, so there’s a bit of trade-off.

Thanks for the insights in your ways of doing things, though!

By: Cole Goeppinger

Cole Goeppinger — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 21:35:49 +0000

I found it a lot easier to simply to create an AMI of a configured machine than to hack around the FAH installer, just make sure to snapshot it when it has no work units. Also, I created a cron that uses `nvidia-smi` to see if FahCore_22 is running and restarts FAHClient if it isn’t. The client is a lot more successful on getting new WUs on startup.

By: Gergely Imreh

Gergely Imreh — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:15:05 +0000

In reply to Kit. Good point, thanks, will give that a try!

By: Gergely Imreh

Gergely Imreh — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:14:18 +0000

In reply to Leonis Smith.

Yeah, definitely agree that there’s more people helping than how much work needing to be done. I’ve stopped doing running my setup for quite a while now, but feels like a good learning experience, and easy to spin up things again, when there’s more to do in the future. It is good to keep an eye on their stats at https://apps.foldingathome.org/serverstats where it shows up a bit when the relevant servers are just not functioning well. It’s not super straightforward, though, sometimes things look good, but don’t work in practice. I guess this should stabilise over time.

By: Kit

Kit — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 22:05:48 +0000

Consider using the newer, non-beta package for this:
debian-stable-64bit/v7.5/fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb

Set fold-anon to false to ensure you get credit.

By: Transform your server into a stateless F@h appliance - vCloud Vision

Transform your server into a stateless F@h appliance - vCloud Vision — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 10:42:54 +0000

[…] for this code go to Gergely Imreh who wrote an article about setting up Folding@Home on […]

By: Leonis Smith

Leonis Smith — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 04:26:51 +0000

Folding@Home has been hammered into massive overload on not having work to go around for a couple of WEEKS now.
It’s nice to want to be able to help, but it’s a waste right now – they’re trying to get their infrastructure AND THE AMOUNT OF WORK AVAILABLE built up to handle the BALLPARK 100 TIMES AS MANY FOLDERS as they had before the COVID assist request, but they just can’t generate work units to keep the massive response BUSY.